Infamous online hacktivist group Anonymous claimed on Wednesday to have published the IP addresses of more than 190 visitors to child pornography sites.
In a statement posted on file-sharing site pastebin.com, Anonymous said it was exposing the IP addresses as part of a campaign dubbed “Operation Darknet.”
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The group is most famously known for hitting corporate and big-business sites with DDoS attacks, briefly taking over operations or scraping information. The most well-known of the radical group’s hacks involved taking down websites belonging to Bank of America and Sony.
The group’s latest target is web hosting company, Freedom Hosting, a server that Anonymous accuses of hosting more than 40 child pornography websites, and visitors of those sites who have hidden their identities using Tor, software that allows users to communicate anonymously on the internet.
Most of the IP addresses of visitors to child porn sites exposed by Anonymous were in the United States but some were located in Europe, Latin America, and elsewhere.
In a statement last month, the group sent a warning to Freedom Hosting: “Our demands are simple. Remove all child pornography content from your servers. Refuse to provide hosting services to any website dealing with child pornography. This statement is not just aimed at Freedom Hosting, but everyone on the internet. It does not matter who you are, if we find you to be hosting, promoting, or supporting child pornography, you will become a target.”
Anonymous said it captured the IP addresses of visitors to child porn sites by tricking users into downloading a fake update to Tor software, which can be used to obscure an Internet user’s identity.
The purported Tor update actually routed traffic to a forensics server controlled by Anonymous that logged incoming IP addresses and destinations.
During a 24-hour period last week, Anonymous said it captured the unique IP addresses of 190 visitors to child porn forums.
According to the hacker group, “99%” of Tor users are Iranian and Chinese journalists and government intelligence agencies fighting a secret war with al-Qaeda, and of course members of Anonymous. The group also said it found some users of Tor accessing sites like “Lolita City” and “The Hurt Site,” a site that Anonymous said is dedicated to child rape.
“The only purpose of Operation Darknet was to reveal that a service like the ‘Tor Project’ has been ruined by the one percent using it for child pornography,” the group said on Pastebin.
“This is so law enforcement can have the probable cause to arrest these individuals, who are clearly accessing TOR sites containing child pornography,” the group said.
Below is what Anonymous claims is a location map of the home IP addresses of visitors to child porn sites.
